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Reviewed by:
  • Charles Thomas Jackson: "The Head behind the Hands": Applying Science to Implement Discovery and Invention in Early Nineteenth Century America
  • A. J. Wright, M.L.S.
Richard J. Wolfe and Richard Patterson. Charles Thomas Jackson: "The Head behind the Hands": Applying Science to Implement Discovery and Invention in Early Nineteenth Century America. Novato, California, HistoryOfScience.com, 2007. x, 417 pp., illus. $35.00.

With this book Wolfe completes a trio of works devoted to the major American figures in the "discovery" of anesthesia in the 1840s: the dentists Horace Wells and William T. G. Morton, and physician, geologist, and chemist Charles T. Jackson. Wolfe dismisses any claims on behalf of Crawford Long in Georgia or William E. Clarke in Rochester, New York; "they were mere side shows to the main event that took place in New England" (5). In I Awaken to Glory: Essays Celebrating Horace Wells (Boston, Massachusetts: Boston Medical Library and the Historical Museum of Medicine and Dentistry, Hartford, 1994), Wolfe and his co-authors made the case for Wells as the "discoverer" of anesthesia. A second work, Tarnished Idol (San Anselmo, California: Norman Publishing, 2001), devoted more than 600 pages to a detailed account of the discovery controversy, Morton's checkered business background, and his apparent willingness to use any unscrupulous means to achieve his goal of making money. The work under review completes this story by attempting to rescue Jackson from the mischaracterizations that have surrounded him since his death in 1880. Here he is helped by Patterson, a physician who has done extensive research on Jackson and his supposed insanity.

The debate over who deserved credit for the discovery of anesthesia began almost immediately after Morton's October 1846 demonstration of ether inhalation during a surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Wells died young in 1848. As examined in Tarnished Idol, Jackson and Morton at first collaborated on the effort to find an agent that would provide pain relief, with Jackson providing the clues Morton needed. The men soon parted ways and spent the next two decades fighting bitterly before Congress and in the court of public opinion as each man attempted to seize credit for the discovery. Witnesses for all three men testified at hearings, and pamphlets, articles and books issued from many pens. Morton died in 1868; Jackson was hospitalized in 1873 in an insane asylum and died there. Wolfe and Patterson document at length the story developed in many sources since that time in which Morton has been depicted as the hero and Jackson as someone trying to seize credit for something he did not do—and who died insane. [End Page 429]

The book's first substantial chapter is "Reappraising the Myth of Jackson's Insanity" and summarizes the research by Wolfe and Patterson to establish "how this misconception of Jackson's mental state arose and over time became enlarged and distorted, repeated and repeated" (10). Primary author Wolfe examined contemporary and secondary accounts of Jackson's life down to the present day to establish just how the characterization of Jackson's mental state after 1873 became "insanity." The authors here expose a shameful record of repetition without original research by numerous anesthesia "historians." Patterson has previously published an article on Jackson's illness that concludes he probably had a stroke followed by aphasia. Jackson's family had him admitted to the McLean Hospital because that is where he could receive ongoing care.

In the next chapter, the authors examine and offer correctives related to other charges against Jackson, that of alcoholism, and the nature of his participation in a mining survey in Michigan from 1847 to 1850. Then the authors devote a chapter to Jackson's "Early Scientific and Medical Training and His Abandonment of Medicine for a Career in Science." Here we learn the depth of training Jackson received at Harvard from such luminaries of the age as physician Walter Channing and chemist John White Webster. Jackson graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1829. By 1836, Jackson had opened a private chemistry laboratory in Boston, and the authors show how subsequent scholarship on the history of science in New England has recognized Jackson as "one of the...

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